A Preface to Man

by Subhash Chandran

  Once the month of Karkkadakam was over, the water in the Thachanakkara thevar’s pond, confined for centuries, was pumped out and remedial rituals performed for the purification of the pond after the inauspicious death in its depths. The contaminated water pumped out from the temple pond flowed in streams in front of all the houses of Thachanakkara. Initially, clear as tears and later thick as excrement, the flow continued. A task which looked as daunting as emptying the ocean was successfully completed before Thiruvonam. On Jithen’s birthday, the day after Thiruvonam, and the first day after the conclusion of the fifteen-day pollution period following her father’s death, Chinnamma, who was at the temple, went up to the pond.

  The new day’s light falling on the new waters without the algae bloom of yesteryears, like a newborn child, smiled at Jithen without Chinnamma noticing it.

  Part 4

  Moksha

  ‘Man is the only creature that perishes before attaining full growth!’

  —Anonymous

  ONE

  Portal

  15 August 1999

  …I got up very late today. Last night, I sat up late, scribbling this and that. Things without any structure or scheme. Considering the existing ways of writing a novel, I do not think that I would be able to write about the life of our times. To invent a new method of narration is more difficult than discovering a continent. Yet, while others are sound asleep, a few are trying to do just that the world over, burning midnight oil. Why do they sit down and spend so much of their time writing, moving between the heart and the mind, into which emotions and thoughts are sieved, like in the two chambers of a repeatedly turned hourglass? In this island of solitude, where neither money nor fame is of use, why does one want to sacrifice oneself? I want to ask these questions to the world once again, standing on top of its head—in the full-throated manner of Ayyaattumpilli stock.

  Today is a holiday. I had wanted to go and meet Amma and Acchan at our place. But I am running a high temperature. Maybe Independence-fever. I don’t know what I will do the whole day. Like solitude, fever too does help writing. But what’s the use of writing? Will anyone want to publish a novel written by someone like me? Or, even if they publish it, these days, will anyone read a novel with involvement? We, who respect the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids for their size, would denigrate a novel for the same reason. Do you know that it is because death is inhered in them that these creations have become so magnificent?

  Largeness, we have started believing, is a liability even if it is of the heart. Would there be ten people below fifty years of age in our state who would have read Kunjikuttan Thampuran’s translation of Mahabharatham in its entirety? If I tell you that, for Malayalis—whose state, Kerala, has a seashore running along its entire length—except for the fishermen, the sea merely represents the time spent on the beach, would you believe it? How much of an expanse! Do we need as much, we may say to each other.

  You needn’t get alarmed. Even I am not certain that I will write a book about Thachanakkara. In order to use this holiday granted by our Independence, I will set aside the writing and go for a porn movie. In the secure darkness, where moustachioed lives gather and get tired from their collective coming together for a little pleasure.

  This cursed loneliness be damned!

  During the study holidays before his annual examination in ninth standard, an unknown muse from somewhere made Jithen write his first poem on the empty pages of his mathematics notebook. He was sitting imprisoned in the square pool of light on which the shadows of the window bars fell, with the book on the table blackened with age. With his eyes frozen on the hibiscus plant seen through the window, he turned to a new page of the notebook. The sour smell of the ink of the new pen, which his father had brought from Aluva for use in the examinations, intoxicated him like never before. Like a yellow fledgling in the throes of death, bleeding blue from its beak, the pen shivered in his hand as he started writing thus on the unruled page, surprising himself:

  Why does the heart resemble a well, O Guru?

  How it had hoped to be like a burning ocean

  Thou art an ocean of wisdom, expansive; Acolyte, I

  Falter as a soul of the well.

  As days pass, will the breadth of the mind

  Shrink, and ailments abound?

  Majesty unbounded, thou art Ocean,

  Becalmed mind, my only companion!

  Angry waves swirl like the essence

  Of tempests! O Guru, even the well is parched!

  Foolish worthies, lowering buckets,

  Deem ripples to be the well’s waves!

  When even tingles bloom, in the confines

  Of stone, only a deepening stillness!

  I espy only circular sky, will not birds

  Be seen, was education misplaced?

  One fear remains: would thou say

  The well too is the offspring of the Ocean?

  Despite a rather unsuccessful attempt to incorporate rhyme and metre migrated from his textbooks, despite the inelegant gawkiness of a novice, Jithen thought that the poem of eighteen lines had something that was intrinsically of his own blended in it—something which, till that moment, was unfamiliar to him. At the same time, it was the verbal body of many unnameable sorrows accumulated lately in his mere thirteen-year-old soul. Acknowledging that it was beyond the powers of appreciation of his classmates and not amenable to parsing by his Malayalam teacher, he signed his name in full, Jithendran, under his debut poem—which was not fortunate enough to find a reader—and shut the book. Then, certain that it was not going to help him ever in his entire life, he opened the book to study geometry, arithmetic, and trigonometry.

  Human letters; animal numerals. For Jithen, that was how he perceived his math textbook. He created night and day by closing and opening his eyes over them. His young heart, cooing in his phlegm-filled chest like doves, would start to dream of a child flying over the green fields. The child who discovered the technique of flying high by inhaling, and descending by exhaling. As he would remain immersed in the dream, many household sounds would pierce his ears.

  His mother ran from the kitchen to the well and back, her invectives let loose. The bucket hung from the rope, falling into the depths, hitting head first. The pulley, which brought up water with a squeaking noise that did not find a mention in the section about levers in the physics textbook. The clanging of the stainless steel vessels that his father had got as awards for maintaining safety at the factory. The frightening tick-tock sound in the portico, dripping from the clock, swinging its ladle-like pendulum. The Philips radio switched on for the film songs and switched off with a curse by either of the sisters as soon as the news in English started. The cawing of crows roasted by the burning sun. Underneath all these, the incessant rubbing of the cymbals by the cicadas of Thachanakkara…

  His ears were large enough to catch all the sounds easily. Made of cartilage, they stood on either side of his big head facing each other like two big interrogation marks. Eons ago, in an incarnation without asthma, one of those ears was used to safeguard a grain of cooked rice kept for Mother upon returning from the celestial world after a feast. Then, the siblings were not sisters with lice-ridden heads; it was a magnificent brother. When starting the return journey after partaking of the splendid feast, a sobering thought arose: there was nothing to give Mother, who would be waiting anxiously, watching his path of return! That was when it was seen: a grain of cooked rice on the tip of the hand that had already been washed. Picking it up, it was kept wedged in the ear. On their arrival home, Mother asked the brother: ‘What did you bring for me?’ With an embarrassed smile on his face that confessed to his forgetfulness, Brother showed his empty open hands. With a sigh, Mother repeated the question to the younger one. Offering her the rice grain from the ear, the younger sibling said hesitatingly, ‘I could bring only this.’

  Mother was gratified by the offering. Touching the head of the younger one, Mother said, ‘Let the heart of those who see you fee
l as fulfilled as my heart is now. Let them rejoice seeing your pleasing moonlight!’ The mother turned angrily to the son who had forgotten her in his time of abundance, and said, ‘Let those who look at you melt. And curse you for the heat!’

  That mother was none other than Earth; the Sun and Moon, the siblings. In this story, of the two, which Aunt Kunthi used to narrate repeatedly to Jithen, he was the younger sibling, who would return from the heavens with the grain of rice. Jithen knew that God had given him such large ears to accommodate the big grain of rice from heaven.

  Apart from such stories told by Aunt Kunthi with elephantiasis, the illustrated storybooks borrowed from classmates, drawn in yellow and black, detective stories drawn and illustrated by someone called Kannadi Vishwanathan, and the made-up stories narrated by Granpa Raambilla in his neighbourhood, gave Jithen’s childhood a power bestowed only upon dreamers. Grandpa Raambilla, with his dark face and broken, deformed teeth, who was continuing as the Raambillapolice of Thachanakkara despite his superannuation, used to narrate stories to Jithen in the afternoons when he had no school, with the innate creativity and imagination of a policeman for inventing stories. He had overcome the black devil of Kaniyankunnu, the cheetah of Chenkottukonam, and the great wrestler of Mammallapuram wearing trousers pressed at right angles to keep them from touching the thighs, body-hugging khaki shirt, cap with a sharply conical top, calves that were strapped with pattis and booted legs. Nowhere did he have to fight. Even before one twirl of the bamboo lathi—which Jithen fancied to be a flute—was completed, everyone would come, prostrate themselves, and surrender.

  ‘I made your uncle a policeman. Who? Your Pankaachammavan! He threw it away and is back home now, no?’ Granpa Raambilla repeated often. ‘Now you have to grow up for Thachanakkara to have a super policeman! A policeman who will beat all and sundry into a pulp, right?’

  Jithen knew that the child, who in his previous incarnation had carried in his ear a grain of rice for his mother, could never be the policeman who would beat up people and extract their juices. Therefore, he maintained silence and did not even acknowledge Granpa Raambilla’s desire with a murmured assent. He would look up at the sky on those occasions; at the blazing sunlight gobbling up the tiny arecanuts perched atop the unruly heads of the areca palms, tired from their swaying. Beyond that, the afternoon breeze was playing, blowing cottony clouds into the blue sky. The songs from Akashvani radio station were seeping into the radio without wilting in the sun or blowing about in the wind or getting caught in the areca palms…

  Time came flying down from the heavens and touched him. ‘When I grow up,’ Jithen asked one day, ‘will Granpa Raambilla be there?’

  The moment he asked that question, Granpa Raambilla knew Jithen had grown up. Children do not ask questions about the future. Apprehensions about surviving and death also do not go with their innocence. From that day on, Granpa Raambilla avoided stories about overcoming cheetahs and demons. One day, when Granpa Raambilla mentioned that behind Naraapilla’s death in the temple pond, there was a third party’s hand, partly as soliloquy and partly to him, Jithen too understood that he was now grown up.

  The days when there was no school, they used to go for walks. In between, Jithen had transplanted to his own grandfather, his childhood affection that he had nurtured for Granpa Raambilla. After the interval, by the time he returned, Granpa Raambilla had prepared many lessons for him. To catch the bandicoots in the compound, they rigged up big bamboo traps with drawn strings. In the evenings, after keeping the traps reminiscent of the bow of Lord Kama, Granpa Raambilla would put a ladder against the corky coral tree and cut down leaves for his pet rabbits. For Jithen, who was waiting below, blood-coloured flowers would rain down. Fetching broken bricks from Devassy’s kiln and using clay as mortar, they built small houses for the rabbits. At the same time, every morning, they would rejoice at the sight of the dead bandicoot caught in one of the many traps, with their necks strangulated in the noose and ants crawling over the carcasses. Thorny questions about how building a hutch to raise one animal, when killing another one with nooses and slipknots could become equally pleasurable for human beings, had not started budding in Jithen’s mind yet. Jithen also had not recognized the contradiction that it was the same Granpa Raambilla, not fated to father his own children, who loved him like his own grandchild and yet created the lunatic Alamboori from a fine young man called Vasudevan, for the folk of Thachanakkara. Jithen enjoyed the act of Granpa Raambilla’s Narasimham, sticking the nail-shaped petals of the coral tree to his own nails with spittle. When the Narasimham killed the father to save the son and roared, pulling out his entrails, Jithen laughed.

  Those were happy days. A childhood of plenitude, when rains beamed like sunshine and sunshine drizzled like rain. They were like the easy-to-read illustrated tales, simple and limpid. They passed without complaint or sorrow. Jithen could recall every detail till the day of his death: the upside-down image of the world seen on the drops of water, during rainy days, on the rusting blue-painted gate. In each drop, it was different. Even the tingling that the raindrops caused on the skin as one touched and took them in one’s dry palm was different with each drop.

  Till his mother had called stridently three or four times, he would stay in Granpa Raambilla’s house. He loved that house with a small veranda, two termite-eaten pillars, and a pleasingly cool parapet, more than his own. It was from behind one of those pillars that Narasimham with coral tree petal nails used to jump out. Even when he knew they were not related, he continued to call Thachanakkara’s Raambillapolice Granpa Raambilla. He considered that house his own.

  Jithen had not reached the age when the world is divided into one’s and the other’s. The awareness that, like the sky, the air, and the river, everything belonged to everybody, gave each day a remarkable lambency. Time for Jithen was a celebration of today, which had no yesterday or tomorrow. When hungry, noon; when the school bell rang, evening; when sleepy, night; when waking up, morning again…

  But there were many people around him who were not like that: His father, who started early in the morning for the aluminium factory, on foot, wearing a white shirt and mundu, after dusting his neck with Cuticura powder to mask the smell of sweat on the shirt he had worn the previous day too; his mother, who would wake up much before Jithen did, and wake up the stove and the vessels and get busy amongst them, doing chores, neither the beginning or end of which she could recall nor knew; his cousins, who would talk of many jobs, do none, and spend hours in front of the mirror, cursing the hair and moustache for not growing or not becoming wavy in the way they wanted it to be; the girls of Ayyaattumpilli who would wash the bloodied rags of their monthly periods each month, with the same abhorrence with which they read their schoolbooks, and chanted the Harinaamakeerthanam hymns in the late evenings… Thus, each of them gave the impression of doing something or running behind some task, which they could not master, and getting flustered. While daydreaming, thanks to the sedation of his asthma medicines, Jithen used to think that if the men of the house did not go to the factories, or the women did not do the household chores, or the boys and girls did not waste time meditating on their bodily emissions, nothing would change in the world. The world would still hang upside-down like a bat on the drops of water on the rusted gate. When he brushed it with the palm, it would just dissolve and spread.

  In his thirteenth year, the inauspicious thirteenth, when one is a human child in the perspective of others, yet is starting life as a man, Jithen’s mind was muddled more than that of the other Ayyaattumpilli children. Sitting in the toilet, he would ponder for hours over God, a God beyond the temples and tales of His incarnations. He was certain that this place was better than the temple for such ruminations. And when he would stand in front of the steps of the sanctum sanctorum for the evening deeparadhana pooja at Thachanakkara temple along with his sisters, brushing against mature women in the crowd who smelt like elephant dung, his animal instincts would wake up and trumpet. He had sta
rted feeling the annoyance of being unable to hide from himself, even when unseen by others, as was the case with God.

  As the age of Paramahamsans was past, he could never become a Narendran and thus, become a Swami Vivekananda. Even if he were able to find a Paramahamsan any time in his life, it was likely that Jithen may reject him, considering the inferiority in becoming someone’s disciple. However, reinforcing certain precepts of the greatness of man that he received as a child, he had created within himself a guru. It had to be believed that he had foreseen his fate of failing in every test put forth by that guru.